Category: UNCATEGORIZED

In spite of being in the midst of a pandemic sowing economic uncertainty, one area that continues to thrive is cloud computing. Perhaps that explains why Microsoft, which saw Azure grow 59% in its most recent earnings report, announced plans to open a new data center in New Zealand once it receives approval from the Overseas Investment Office.

“This significant investment in New Zealand’s digital infrastructure is a testament to the remarkable spirit of New Zealand’s innovation and reflects how we’re pushing the boundaries of what is possible as a nation,” Vanessa Sorenson, general manager at Microsoft New Zealand said in a statement.

The company sees this project against the backdrop of accelerating digital transformation that we are seeing as the pandemic forces companies to move to the cloud more quickly with employees often spread out and unable to work in offices around the world.

As CEO Satya Nadella noted on Twitter, this should help companies in New Zealand that are in the midst of this transformation. “Now more than ever, we’re seeing the power of digital transformation, and today we’re announcing a new datacenter region in New Zealand to help every organization in the country build their own digital capability,” Nadella tweeted.

The company wants to do more than simply build a data center. It will make this part of a broader investment across the country, including skills training and reducing the environmental footprint of the data center.

Once New Zealand comes on board, the company will boast 60 regions covering 140 countries around the world. The new data center won’t just be about Azure, either. It will help fuel usage of Office 365 and the Dynamics 365 back-office products, as well.

Under different circumstances, GitHub would be hosting its Satellite conference in Paris this week. Like so many other events, GitHub decided to switch Satellite to a virtual event, but that isn’t stopping the Microsoft-owned company from announcing quite a bit of news this week.

The highlight of GitHub’s announcement is surely the launch of GitHub Codespaces, which gives developers a full cloud-hosted development environment in the cloud, based on Microsoft’s VS Code editor. If that name sounds familiar, that’s likely because Microsoft itself rebranded Visual Studio Code Online to Visual Studio Codespaces a week ago — and GitHub is essentially taking the same concepts and technology and is now integrating it directly inside its service. If you’ve seen VS Online/Codespaces before, the GitHub environment will look very similar.

“Contributing code to a community can be hard. Every repository has its own way of configuring a dev environment, which often requires dozens of steps before you can write any code,” writes Shanku Niyogi, GitHub’s SVP of Product, in today’s announcement. “Even worse, sometimes the environment of two projects you are working on conflict with one another. GitHub Codespaces gives you a fully-featured cloud-hosted dev environment that spins up in seconds, directly within GitHub, so you can start contributing to a project right away.”

Currently, GitHub Codespaces is in beta and available for free. The company hasn’t set any pricing for the service once it goes live, but Niyogi says the pricing will look similar to that of GitHub Actions, where it charges for computationally intensive tasks like builds. Microsoft currently charges VS Codespaces users by the hour and depending on the kind of virtual machine they are using.

The other major new feature the company is announcing today is GitHub Discussions. These are essentially discussion forums for a given project. While GitHub already allowed for some degree of conversation around code through issues and pull requests, Discussions are meant to enable unstructured threaded conversations. They also lend themselves to Q&As, and GitHub notes that they can be a good place for maintaining FAQs and other documents.

Currently, Discussions are in beta for open-source communities and will be available for other projects soon.

On the security front, GitHub is also announcing two new features: code scanning and secret scanning. Code scanning checks your code for potential security vulnerabilities. It’s powered by CodeQL and free for open-source projects. Secret scanning is now available for private repositories (a similar feature has been available for public projects since 2018). Both of these features are part of GitHub Advanced Security.

As for GitHub’s enterprise customers, the company today announced the launch of Private Instances, a new fully managed service for enterprise customers that want to use GitHub in the cloud but know that their code is fully isolated from the rest of the company’s users. “Private Instances provides enhanced security, compliance, and policy features including bring-your-own-key encryption, backup archiving, and compliance with regional data sovereignty requirements,” GitHub explains in today’s announcement.

Uber and Airbnb are cutting significant portions of their workforce, Microsoft announces new Surface devices and we talk to Apple Craig Federighi about the new iPad cursor.

Here’s your Daily Crunch for May 6, 2020.

1. Uber is laying off 3,700 as rides plummet due to COVID-19

In an SEC filing, Uber disclosed plans to layoff 3,700 employees — around 14% percent of the ride hailing giant’s total workforce. The company says that the job loss is part of a planned reduction in operating expenses “in response to the economic challenges and uncertainty resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on the company’s business.”

Meanwhile, Airbnb also announced major cuts — 1,900 employees, or about 25% of its total workforce. The impacted groups include Transportation and Airbnb Studios (which will be placed on hold), as well as Hotels and Lux (which will be scaled back).

2. Microsoft’s Surface Go 2 and Surface Book 3 are official

Chief Product Officer Panos Panay announced a slew of new products. The headliners here are the latest versions of the Surface Book and Surface Go, but here are also updates on the line’s headphone offerings.

3. How Apple reinvented the cursor for iPad

In order to dive deeper on the brand new cursor and its interaction models, we spoke to Apple SVP Craig Federighi, who told us, “We knew we wanted a very touch-centric cursor that was not conveying an unnecessary level of precision.”

4. Twitter runs a test prompting users to revise ‘harmful’ replies

In this new test, users who use “harmful” language will see a prompt suggesting that they self-edit before posting. The framing here is a bit disingenuous, but anything that can reduce toxicity on the platform is probably better than what we’ve got now.

5. The future of deep-reinforcement learning, our contemporary AI superhero

Entrepreneur and investor Rish Joshi explores the implications of deep-reinforcement learning — the technology behind the superman performance of AIs in games ranging from Go to Dota to classic Atari titles. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

6. Alphabet’s Loon partners with AT&T to extend coverage globally in case of disasters

This partnership will help Loon ensure it’s in a much better position to address any potential need for disaster response cellular network coverage, thanks to AT&T and it global network partners. Loon’s system will now be fully integrated with AT&T, and this will also extend to any third-party mobile service provider that is already partnered with the U.S. carrier.

7. Social network for women Peanut raises $12M Series A amid pandemic

Peanut, an app that began as a tool for finding new mom friends, has evolved into a social network now used by 1.6 million women to discuss a range of topics, from pregnancy and parenthood to marriage and menopause, and everything in between.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

Meet Kairn, a new startup coming out of stealth today with a sneak peek of what the company has been working on. As Wunderlist shuts down, Kairn wants to prove that there’s still room for an innovative task management service.

“We’re building a task manager that is smart and focused on capturing tasks,” co-founder and CEO Patricia Bernasconi told me. The startup is backed by eFounders, a startup studio that has been building popular software-as-a-service startups over the past few years.

And it starts with three integrations with third-party services — Slack, WhatsApp and Gmail. If you star an email conversation in Gmail, it’ll automatically create a task in Kairn. Similarly, if you star a message in Slack, it’ll end up in your todo list. With WhatsApp, you can forward a message to a bot to capture it in Kairn.

“You don’t have to switch apps constantly and you create tasks on the fly,” Bernasconi said.

And you can always trigger the Kairn quick add window on your computer to add a task when you’re using another app. The idea is that it should be as easy as possible to enter tasks in your task repository — Kairn in this case.

After that, you can open the main Kairn desktop app and dig through your task inbox to see what you should do. You can filter tasks by origin application and you can click on a task to look at the context of an email thread or a Slack message for instance.

Kairn then lets you move tasks to the main list, ‘My Day’. It works pretty much like Wunderlist or Microsoft To Do — once per day, you can curate a list of tasks and then go through the list during your day.

The product is quite new as the company started development in April — beta testing will start in the coming weeks. But the idea is to iterate quickly and release new features as soon as they’re ready.

For instance, the mobile app is still in the works. There will be more ways to add tasks in the future as well. You could imagine highlighting text in your browser to create a task based on that text selection.

Over time, Kairn wants to become a full-fledged task management service. You’ll be able to assign tasks and use it for complex project management scenarios. We’ll keep an eye on the startup to see where they’re heading.

Africa-focused tech talent accelerator Andela has let go 135 employees, CEO Jeremy Johnson confirmed to TechCrunch on a call.

Senior staff at the company — with offices in New York and five African countries — will also take salary cuts of 10 to 30%.

The compensation and staff reductions are a result of the economic impact of the COVID-19 and bring Andela’s headcount down to 1199 employees. None of Andela’s engineers were included in the layoffs.

Backed by $181 million in VC from investors that include the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the startup’s client-base is comprised of more than 200 companies around the world that pay for the African developers Andela selects and trains to work on projects.

There’s been a drop in the demand for Andela’s services, according to its CEO.

“The vast majority of our customers have stayed with us. But new business has slowed down dramatically,” Johnson told TechCrunch on a call.

“Like any venture backed startup we’re built for growth. And so if growth is gonna slow dramatically, your burden has to come down.”

Andela’s Nigeria office; Image Credits: Andela

The company is also preparing for the possibility of hard economic times moving forward.

“We already know this is going to have a material impact on pace of growth. And as a result of that, we’ve got to make sure we’re prepared to…weather the storm,” Johnson said.

The American CEO noted the latest measures weren’t entirely due to external factors. They also connect to a strategic direction change for the company, the details of which will follow, according to Johnson.

Andela’s staff cuts mark the first notable round of layoffs in African tech coming from one of the the continent’s best funded and most visible startups (by press volume).

The company launched in 2014 with co-founders who included Nigerian entrepreneur Iyinoluwa Aboyeji, Ian Carinvale and American Christine Sass. Aboyeji has since departed and Sass stepped down as Andela president in 2019, but maintains an advisory role.

In Africa, Andela has offices in Nigeria, Kenya,  Rwanda, Uganda and Egypt. The company cut 400 junior engineers in September, but that announcement came with news it had attained a $50 million run-rate as a Series D startup.

Pinterest is today introducing new features that make it easier for those planning recipes, virtual events, and other quarantine activities. These include the ability to add a date or notes to a board as well as automated ways to better organize your pins on a given board, with the aid of machine learning technology.

The company has seen increases in particular types of activities on its platform amid the quarantine. For example, it’s seen an over 50% increase in people using the site to plan virtual events — like virtual birthday parties, baby showers, or virtual educational activities.

Meanwhile, it’s also seen people planning ahead for their post-quarantine projects as well as an overall 60% increase in the number of boards created versus the same time last year. Engagement with boards is also up nearly 75% on a year-over-year basis and up nearly 50% month-over-month.

The addition of board notes will allow Pinterest users to annotate their saves with personal notes — like adding a list of ingredients accompany a pinned recipe, a list of tasks for a project, a to-do list, or anything else they want to note.

Also new is the ability to add a date to board. This can help with project planning or to just keep boards better organized by dates. When projects wrap, it may be easier to find the old boards to archive if they have a date attached.

Finally, Pinterest is upgrading its board technology to suggest sections to add to a board.

For example, if you have a fairly broad topic — like “kids’ activities” — Pinterest may now recommend organizing the pins into sections like “art projects,” “outdoor games,” and others. And when you’re starting a new board, Pinterest may suggest sections to add as soon as you save your first pin.

The company says it’s using its data on billions of saved ideas combined with machine learning and Pinterest’s own PinSage technology, in order to determine how pins should be grouped. This problem is challenging, Pinterest notes, because it has to accurately cluster together similar pins and predict how a Pinner may want to organize their board.

These new board features are rolling out globally starting today on web, iOS and Android.

The new features are meant to help Pinterest respond to the changes in consumer behavior since the COVID-19 pandemic, where people had temporarily turned away from planning for travel or in-person events, and instead are using their boards to organize for quarantine-related activities, like a child’s homeschooling or virtual events.

The launches follow Pinterest’s report this week of a solid Q1 amid the COVID-19 pandemic. The company grew its revenue 35% year-over-year to $272 million and grew its user base 26% year-over-year to 367 million, beating projections for both. However, it reported a loss of 10 cents per share, versus the expected loss of 9 cents per share.

But Wall St. wasn’t happy with Pinterest’s user growth, CNBC reported, which was up 6% year-over-year in the U.S., compared with 8% in the fourth quarter. Overall, Pinterest’s growth of 26% was the same annualized growth rate it saw in the fourth quarter — in other words, flat. This was unexpected, given Pinterest’s claims of pandemic-related record usage in March and the gains other social platforms have seen, including Facebook and Snapchat.

Pinterest also warned of a tough road ahead, due to pandemic-related adverting declines.

Modern Games is a new studio working to create games that combine physical and digital play.

The company was founded by husband-and-wife team Justin and Amanda Kifer — serial entrepreneurs who previously launched companies including Citizen Local (acquired by MyLife in 2011) and Fidgetly, a fidget spinner company that also created a motion controller for iOS and Android games.

It sounds like the Kifers have a number of new titles in development, but the company is announcing today that it has acquired and is relaunching an existing game, Beasts of Balance.

The game was first released by Sensible Object in 2016. As demonstrated for me by Justin Kifer (the startup’s CEO), Beasts of Balance involves stacking physical animal pieces, while also scanning them into a companion app that keeps score and brings their fantastical skills to life. The basic game costs $99 (currently on sale for $79), and players can purchase expansion packs to get additional accessories, beasts and other “artefacts.”

The other Modern Games titles released this year will be purely physical board and card games, released under its Modern Games [Analog] brand. Kifer told me that the company’s big “flagship” launch is planned for 2021, with a mobile game that involves augmented reality and connected objects, and that takes place in a rich science fiction/fantasy world. In fact, Kifer’s even writing a series of young adult novels to flesh out the setting.

“I want people to think of Modern Games as a studio that is working hard every day push the boundaries what it is to play a game,” he said.

Image Credits: Modern Games

Kifer suggested that by combining physical and digital gameplay, Modern Games’ titles will have the real-world social component of a traditional tabletop game while taking advantage of gameplay that’s also possible digitally.

Kifer also said that by always starting with a core physical product that players need to buy, the company can avoid having to go the free-to-play route adopted by most mobile games. At the same time, he also emphasized that the company will keep the games relatively affordable, with a sub-$40 price for core products. (There were will be additional monetization through physical and digital add-ons.)

On the other hand, our remote demo made it clear that there’s a downside to relying on a physical products — since we weren’t in the same room (and, given COVID-19, are unlikely to be anytime soon), Kifer and I couldn’t actually play the game together.

“The games that we’re working on right now are also multi-player,” Kifer said when I pointed this out. “They’re games that could be played in proximity to other others, but they don’t have to be. For us, it’s all about bringing people together in ways that are inherently social, but it doesn’t necessarily mean physically co-located.”

Volvo Cars will start producing vehicles in 2020 that are equipped with lidar and a perception stack — technology developed by Silicon Valley startup Luminar that the automaker will use to deploy an automated driving system for highways.

For now, the lidar will be part of a hardware package that consumers can add as an option to their Volvo vehicle, starting with the second-generation XC90. Volvo will combine Luminar’s lidar with cameras, radar, software and back-up systems for functions such as steering, braking and battery power to enable its highway pilot feature.

Volvo, which is known for making its advanced safety features standard, sees a bigger opportunity in its partnership with Luminar. The Swedish automaker said Luminar will help it improve advanced driver assistance systems and may lead to all of its second-generation Scalable Product Architecture (SPA2) vehicles to come with lidar as a standard feature.

The announcement is a milestone for Luminar and its whiz founder Austin Russell, who burst onto the autonomous vehicle startup scene in April 2017 after operating for years in secrecy. It also makes Volvo the first automaker to equip production vehicles with lidar — the light detection and ranging radar that measures distance using laser light to generate a highly accurate 3D map of the world around the car.

Luminar’s Iris lidar sensors — which TechCrunch has described as about the size of really thick sandwich and one-third smaller than its previous iterations — will be integrated in the roof. The sensor’s tucked away placement is a departure from the bucket style spinning lidars that have become synonymous with autonomous vehicle development.

Image Credits: Volvo

Shipping a vehicle with the proper hardware and perception stack doesn’t mean customers will be able to let their Volvo take over driving on highways from the get go. The software, which is being developed by Zenuity, is still underway, Volvo CTO Henrik Green said.

The software will be activated wirelessly once it is verified to be safe in individual geographic locations. Volvo will continue to expand the capability of the software such as pushing up the maximum speed a vehicle can travel while driving autonomously. This hardware first-continual software update strategy is similar to Tesla, which has sold an automated driving package to consumers for years that has improved over time, but still does not allow for so-called “full self-driving.”

“Soon, your Volvo will be able to drive autonomously on highways when the car determines it is safe to do so,” Green said. “At that point, your Volvo takes responsibility for the driving and you can relax, take your eyes off the road and your hands off the wheel. Over time, updates over the air will expand the areas in which the car can drive itself. For us, a safe introduction of autonomy is a gradual introduction.”

A turning point for lidar

Lidar sensors are considered by many automakers and tech companies an essential piece of technology to safely roll out autonomous vehicles. In the past 18 months, as the timeline to deploy commercial robotaxi fleets has expanded, automakers have turned back to developing nearer term tech for production vehicles.

“It’s a very isolated problem to solve and becomes a lot more solvable in a safe way than trying to solve autonomous driving through the inner city of Los Angeles or San Francisco,” Green said. “By narrowing the use case to those particular highways, we can bring safe autonomy into vehicles for personal use in the timeframe we’re talking about.”

Advanced driver assistance systems, or ADAS, that was pushed aside in pursuit of fully autonomous vehicles has become a darling once again. It’s prompted a pivot within the industry, particularly with lidar companies. Dozens of lidar startups once grappling to become the supplier of choice for fully driverless vehicles are now hawking their wares for use in regular old passenger cars, trucks and SUVs. Some lidar startups such as Luminar have developed the perception software as well in an effort to diversify their business and offer a more appealing package to automakers.

The companies will deepen their collaboration to ensure Luminar’s lidar technology is validated for series production. Volvo Cars said it has signed an agreement to possibly increase its minority stake in Luminar.

IRL, the recently pivoted calendar app that aggregates live virtual events, has today launched a web version of the platform.

The company, which has $11 million in funding from Goodwater Capital, Founders Fund and Floodgate, started as a social planning app that helped folks find each other in the real world, based on interest and geography.

Over time, the company realized the power of the calendar itself. No one has successfully made the calendar social, explained cofounder Abe Shafi. Where you can follow someone’s music on SoundCloud or follow their updates on Twitter, how can you follow their events?

Pre-pandemic, those events were physical events, with people communing in a venue. But the coronavirus may have split open a much wider world for the startup, which recently pivoted into virtual events.

Through API partnerships with YouTube, Twitch and Spotify, as well as user-generated content, IRL (which now stands for In Remote Life) wants to aggregate all the virtual events across the globe into a curated, categorized home page. That may include an esports tournament, a virtual concert, a Zoom cocktail party or a webinar.

Critical to this push is a web presence, which launches today. Folks can follow content producers, or simply get alerts on individual events. Importantly, IRL is also launching an ‘add to calendar’ button that content producers can add to their own websites.

For now, that ‘add to calendar’ button embed is only available to select partners, with a waitlist for others interested in adding the button to their website.

Cofounder and CEO Abe Shafi explained the company’s monetization plans with TechCrunch, though warned that the current focus is gaining a critical mass before flipping on the monetization switch.

“The way we think about making money is around monetizable intent,” said Shafi. “When you’re on Facebook or Instagram, your monetizable intent is pretty low because you’re interested in what your friends are up to. Whereas, when you’re on Google your monetizable intent is really high because your intent is to find something and go somewhere else. Our monetizable intent is much closer to a Google search than it is to a Facebook or an Instagram in the sense that people come to IRL to go to other people’s content that they’re monetizing in one way or another.”

Importantly, content producers must use the app to add their own events to the platform, but Shafi told TechCrunch that the company has plans to add that same functionality to the web product.

When asked whether IRL would get into content creation itself, Shafi said that the premise of that “gives him a headache.”

“We want to be the bank,” said Shafi. “So many great people are creating content. Getting into the content business is its own beast. If we can be seen as the best place to discover it all, that’s a huge win.”